Stickiness

I recently read Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.  The book identifies the six elements that make an idea more likely to "stick."

1. Simplicity - The idea should be simple, yet profound.  Think proverbs.
2. Unexpectedness - The idea might violate people's expectations in order to generate interest and curiosity.
3. Concreteness - Our brains are wired to remember concrete data.
4. Credibility - You need ways to help people test ideas for themselves.
5. Emotions - People will care about our ideas if we make them feel something.
6. Stories - Hearing stories allows us to form a more complete mental catalog of critical situations that we might find ourselves in.

Yes, that acronym spells SUCCES!  This made me think about examples of stickiness in the "real world."

An example of unexpected stickiness is the fairly recent phenomenon of “icing” which was made popular on certain college campuses but has made its way across the country and even onto Wall Street.  Icing is a drinking game whereby an individual is forced to drink a bottle of Smirnoff Ice while on one knee, sometimes in a humiliating fashion.  The game was even featured on CNN Money/Fortune.
While icing has certainly gone viral in the short-run, it remains to be seen if this phenomenon will be sticky in the long-run.  It does contain some of the necessary principles of sticky ideas:  

Simplicity:  It doesn’t get much simpler than drinking a beverage.  

Unexpectedness:  This idea was truly out of left field.  Who would expect a beverage that is typically thought to be consumed by females to be the focus of a drinking game that is played primarily by males?  

Emotions:  Icing does promote specific emotions like fear (about getting iced) and happiness (remembering fondly how you pulled off a prank on a friend).  

Stories:  The viral nature of icing was accelerated by the now-defunct website because the website allowed users to post pictures/videos about their icing experiences and share stories.  The website was recently removed by Smirnoff.